Ladies and gentlemen!We pay a virtual
visit to Circus 'Luikerwalo'. There come the clowns ..... Give them an
applause!

Bad habits. Drinking, gambling, smoking.In addition to its role as popular
entertainment, the magic lantern was also being put to educational purposes. Religious
and idealistic organisations like the Salvation Army and the Temperance
movement used the effectiveness of the magic lantern as a powerful weapon
against the evils of drink and other 'bad habits'.

Once
upon a time.............there lived in Germany two brothers who
gave the world a lot of stories. There names are Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm, but usually we simply call them the Brothers Grimm.

Damon and PythiasThe old Greek legend of Damon and Pythias
symbolizes trust and loyalty in a true friendship.

Masonic Slides.
During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, every local
post of any fraternal lodge like the Masons, owned a magic lantern and a collection of glass magic-lantern
slides.

Birth and Death.
If you like it or not, every human life starts by birth and ends in
death. A collection of magic lantern slides, a few concerning birth, much more concerning death.

Father, dear Father, come Home with me now.
Temperance stories. The temperance movement was always willingly to use
modern technology to achieve its aims and thus magic lantern slides and
photography were put in when teaching the audience the evils of a licentious life.

Expeditions to the Arctic.There are many magic lantern slides that
depict the polar regions and the expeditions to the Arctic. It appears
very hard to determine which set of slides was made by a certain manufacturer.

Magic
lantern slides after the famous stories of Wilhelm Busch.
Wilhelm Busch is best known for his drawings that were accompanied by
wise, satiric and doggerel verse. His 'Bilderbogen stories' are
considered to be precursors of the comic strip, and..... after all also
of the magic lantern slide sets. A lot of them were actually adapted to nice sets of lantern slides.

War Scenes.
Roar of guns and clash of arms, heroism and insanity, snorting horses
and steaming battleships, impressing warlords and perished soldiers,
arid deserts and frozen seas, Boers and British, insurrection and
suppression. The first who's killed in every war is the common sense.

Racial images on magic lantern slides.
The way how non-western people are depicted on magic lantern slides was
not always very sensitive and sometimes make us knit our brows nowadays.
On the other hand we should not make the fault to describe all lantern
slides that depict black people as racist. The bounds between 'funny'
and 'racist' are often difficult to decide. Judge for yourself.

The Tiger and the Tub
"Mr Long & Mr Short go for a walk.....", a well known opening sentence
from a incredible story, told on several sets of magic lantern slides.

The Water-babies
Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom.....
A wonderful set of twenty four slides from Charles Kingsley's famous children's story
'The Water-babies'.

The BottleThe English caricaturist George Cruikshank published
a series of eight plates 'The Bottle' (1847) about the danger
of alcoholism. After the example of his etches some imposing sets of magic lantern slides
appeared.

The
Pilgrim's Progress.After
this famous book from John Bunyan at least fifty different sets of
lantern slides have been made by almost all famous manufacturers,
Bamforth, York, Newton, Theobald, Pumphrey, Barnard, Riley, Butcher and
others. Many manufacturers even released several series into this story,
sometimes consisting of less than ten, but also of more than a hundred
slides. Including 'The Life of John Buryan'.

Maud Muller.
A beautiful set of six hand coloured magic lantern slides illustrating John
Greenleaf Whittier's poem. A sad tale of unrequited love that left us the
famous quote: 'For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these:
'It might have been!'.

Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
A long story as Alice in Wonderland had to be adjusted to conform with the
concept of the Junior Lecturers' Series, implying that the sets always had
to consist of boxes of eight slides. And.... it turns out that there is a
'curved version' and a 'straight version'.

How Jane Conquest rang the
BellThis example of a set of Life Model Slides tells the story of a woman
who is placed in a terrible dilemma: to stay at home with her little child that is dangerously ill, or to leave her
house and try to save the crew of a ship in flames.

Dan Dabberton's Dream.
The set slides of Dan Dabberton tells a tale of drunkenness and Dan's
retreat from the brink of destruction. Just in time. This set is used in
many magic lantern shows and it is always very much appreciated by audiences.

Dick Whittington and his Cat.
Some nice sets of magic lantern slides that depict the English folk tale
surrounding the life of Richard Whittington who really existed once and lived
from 1354–1423. Whittington was a wealthy merchant and became thrice Lord Mayor of London.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown's adventure with a Mouse.Some nice magic lantern
slide sets from the story 'Die Maus oder Die gestörte Nachtruhe', written and illustrated by Wilhelm
Busch. (also known as Mr. and Mrs Brown and the Mouse).

Christie's old Organ.
Some Life Model slide sets after the book of Mrs O.F. Walton.
Several magic lantern slide versions are known of this tear jerking story.
The shows were often brought as a 'Service of Song'. Between the projected
slides and the accompanying texts the audience was supposed to sing a lot of
well known Christian songs.

The Lord's prayer
A very special set of magic lantern slides illustrating the words of the
best-known prayer in Christianity.

Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A lot of beautiful magic lantern slides illustrate Harriet Beecher Stowe's world famous story.
Here are some of them.

The 'Three Little Pigs'.
In 1933 Ensign ltd released a set of twenty-four 'Three Little Pigs'
square magic lantern slides that was soon to be followed by dozens more.

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.A series of magic lantern slides based on a poem by Rose Hartwick Thorpe
about Bessie, a young woman whose lover is captured by the Puritans at
the time of the English Civil War.